“We’re more popular than Jesus now.”
This might be the most provocative statement ever made by a rock star – and that is saying something. The above quotation is by John Lennon in March 1966, back when the Beatles were alive and well, when he was interviewed by journalist Maureen Cleave for the British newspaper, the London Evening Standard. Unlike the usual routine, Cleave interviewed each of the four Beatles individually rather than collectively.
The interview raised few eyebrows until it created a firestorm when the interviews were reprinted in the American teen magazine Datebook in July 1966, with the John Lennon quotation placed on the magazine cover. On August 5, 1966, the story made the front page of the New York Times. Some radio DJ’s publicly announced that they would play no more Beatles songs, and there were bonfires of Beatles records in some areas; even the Ku Klux Klan joined in the protests. There were also protests in Mexico City, and Beatles songs were banned on national radio stations in South Africa and Spain.
The Beatles embarked on what would become their final American tour in August 1966; the animosity toward the band on that tour contributed to the decision by the Beatles to quit touring and become strictly a studio rock band. From Wikipedia: “According to [John] Lennon’s wife, Cynthia [Lennon], he was nervous and upset that he had made people angry simply by expressing his opinion.” Their manager Brian Epstein first attempted to smooth things over by holding a press conference in New York City at the start of the tour, to no avail.
Again, from Wikipedia: “The Beatles attended a press conference in Chicago, Illinois; Lennon did not want to apologize but was advised by [Brian] Epstein and [Beatles press officer Tony] Barrow that he should. [John] Lennon quipped that ‘if I had said television was more popular than Jesus, I might have got away with it’ but stressed that he was simply remarking on how other people viewed and popularized the band.”
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John Lennon made the Beatles an easy target by his remark, but the fact is that church attendance was declining in England and elsewhere in Europe, a pattern that continued in the US some years later. Although Pope Paul VI denounced Lennon’s statement (and actually Pope Benedict XVI apologized for this church stance in 2010), there were few church leaders joining the denunciation of the Beatles, since the Church was going through an intense period of re-examination in this time period. For example, the Jesuit newspaper America wrote about the controversy: “[John] Lennon was simply stating what many a Christian educator would readily admit.”
Earlier that year, on April 8, 1966, the cover of Time magazine famously asked: “Is God Dead?” Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council on October 11, 1962, an earthshaking event in the Roman Catholic Church that attempted to re-frame Catholic teachings in a modern context, leading (among many other major changes) to services being conducted in the language of the people attending rather than Latin. The ramifications remain strongly controversial to this day.
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John Lennon himself had been reading extensively about religion before making his ill-advised statement, and Maureen Cheave noticed a copy of The Passover Plot by Hugh J. Schonfield on his bookshelf during her interview. This scholarly work, which was published in 1965 (and informed many of Lennon’s views toward Christianity), was the Da Vinci Code of its day and portrayed Jesus and His closest disciples as having planned the events leading to the Crucifixion so that He could be taken down from the Cross after a few hours by well-connected individuals (such as Joseph of Arimathea) before He was actually dead and then nursed back to health.
As reported in Wikipedia: “In 1963, the Anglican Bishop of Woolwich, John A. T. Robinson, published a controversial but popular book, Honest to God, urging the nation to reject traditional church teachings on morality and the concept of God as an ‘old man in the sky’, and instead embrace a universal ethic of love.” John Lennon quoted this book in his Chicago press conference.
Also gaining currency in the 1960’s was the notion of loving Jesus Christ and what He stood for, but not wanting to become involved in the Christian Church. John Lennon echoed these sentiments when he was asked to look back on the controversy in an interview in Canada in 1969 (from Wikipedia): “He repeated his opinion that the Beatles were more influential on young people than Christ, adding that some ministers had agreed with him. He called the protesters in the US ‘fascist Christians’, saying he was ‘very big on Christ. I’ve always fancied him. He was right.’” Also in 1969: “In a BBC interview . . . [John] Lennon called himself ‘One of Christ’s biggest fans’, talked about the Church of England, his vision of heaven, and unhappiness over being unable to marry Yoko Ono in [the] church.”
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While the quotation itself faded quickly – particularly after the band released their monumental Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album the following year – its effects never really went away. Here is the chorus in the Beatles’ final #1 single, “The Ballad of John & Yoko” (and clearly John Lennon is addressing Jesus, not voicing an oath): “Christ, you know it ain’t easy / You know how hard it can be / The way things are going / They’re gonna crucify me.”
“Imagine”, perhaps John Lennon’s best known song – certainly among his solo recordings – opens with: “Imagine there’s no Heaven” – but I actually heard an evangelist once attempt to recast “Imagine” as a Christian song. In another of his songs, “God”, John Lennon recites a long list of disbeliefs, beginning with “I don’t believe in magic” and ending with “I don’t believe in Beatles”, with Jesus (along with other religious leaders) appearing about halfway through.
In a 2005 reminiscence by Maureen Cheave, called “The John Lennon I Knew” (published in The Daily Telegraph), she recalls a 1978 interview (as reported in Wikipedia) where Lennon said: “If I hadn’t said [that] and upset the very Christian Ku Klux Klan, well, Lord, I might still be up there with all the other performing fleas! God bless America. Thank you, Jesus.”
Mark David Chapman, the man who assassinated John Lennon in 1980, became a born-again Christian in 1970 and had been incensed by the “more popular than Jesus” remark, as well as the sentiments in “God” and “Imagine”.
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Paul McCartney, like George Harrison was baptized as a Catholic; and his upbringing shows through in the lyrics of one of the Beatles’ last singles, “Let it Be”:
When I find myself in times of trouble
Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be
And in my hour of darkness
She is standing right in front of me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be
Paul McCartney has said that the origin of “Mother Mary” is not Mary the Mother of Jesus, but rather his own mother, Mary Mohin McCartney, who had died of cancer when he was 14. McCartney had a dream about his mother during the tumultuous period when the double-LP The Beatles – a/k/a the White Album – was being recorded; he recalled (as quoted in Wikipedia): “‘It was great to visit with her again. I felt very blessed to have that dream. So that got me writing “Let it Be”.’ He also said in a later interview about the dream that his mother had told him, ‘It will be all right, just let it be.’ When asked if the song referred to the Virgin Mary, however, McCartney has typically answered the question by assuring his fans that they can interpret the song however they would like.”
In addition to “Mother Mary” – a term frequently used by believers to refer to Mary – Wikipedia notes that “let it be” is also a part of the response by Mary to the Annunciation by the Angel Gabriel: “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).
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George Harrison was the most spiritual of the Beatles. Along with the other Beatles, the Beach Boys, and many other celebrities, George Harrison spent time in 1968 with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi; but his interest in Hinduism predated that experience by several years. Wikipedia mentions several earlier encounters: “During the filming of Help! in the Bahamas [in 1965], [the Beatles] met the founder of Sivananda Yoga,Swami Vishnu-Devananda, who gave each of them a signed copy of his book, The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga.”
Following the Beatles’ last tour, and before recording on Sgt. Pepper began in 1967, George Harrison and his wife Pattie Boyd made a pilgrimage to Bombay, where he studied the sitar, met several gurus, and visited many holy places.
Also from Wikipedia: “[George] Harrison became a vegetarian in the late 1960s, and a devotee of the Indian mystic Paramahansa Yogananda, a guru who proselytised Kriya yoga, after he was given Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi by Ravi Shankar. (Yogananda and three other major figures from Kriya yoga, Sri Mahavatar Babaji, Sri Yukteswar Giri, and Sri Lahiri Mahasaya appear on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.)”
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The liner notes for the album were a mess, and George Harrison was not originally credited with performing any of the music, leading many to think that he merely oversaw the album; actually, in addition to arranging the music, Harrison played electric and acoustic guitar, piano, and Mellotron. Other musicians on the album include Eric Clapton on electric guitar – credited as “Eddie Clayton” – Harrison’s bandmate Ringo Starr on drums, and Peter Tork of the Monkees who plays banjo (!). In 1969, George Harrison collaborated with Eric Clapton in writing perhaps my very favorite song by Cream, “Badge”.
One disadvantage of my early exposure to Wonderwall Music was that the bar was set very high for me as far as incorporating Indian musical forms into rock music, and I was disappointed by most sitar work on rock albums since then.
Ravi Shankar is the Indian musician best known to American audiences; this master of the sitar performed often at rock festivals like Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Following Woodstock though, he distanced himself from the hippie subculture, as Wikipedia put it (what I heard was that, basically, he thought everyone was too stoned to truly appreciate his music). Shankar has a musician daughter, Norah Jones.
Following the Beatles’ lead, many rock musicians began incorporating sitar into their recordings, including the Byrds and Stone Poneys; the Beatles song “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)”, included on their 1965 album Rubber Soul, was the first rock song to include sitar music, which was played by George Harrison on the song. One of my favorite songs on the Sgt. Pepper album, “Within You, Without You”, was composed by George Harrison, who plays sitar and another Indian instrument, the tambura; several Indian musicians were also on hand.
Following the break-up of the Beatles, George Harrison released a mammoth two-record album in 1970 called All Things Must Pass that also included a third disk called Apple Jam. Clearly Harrison was creating a lot of music that wasn’t winding up on the Beatles albums; for instance, Anthology 3 includes an early demo of the title song for this album, “All Things Must Pass”. By the time “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun” showed up on Abbey Road, nearly all rock critics were acknowledging that George Harrison was a songwriter equal to John Lennon and Paul McCartney; but I had noticed that at least as far back as Revolver, where his songs were “Taxman”, “Love You To” and “I Want to Tell You”.
Richie Unterberger writing for Allmusic notes: “Without a doubt, [George] Harrison’s first solo recording, originally issued as a triple album, is his best. Drawing on his backlog of unused compositions from the late Beatles era, George crafted material that managed the rare feat of conveying spiritual mysticism without sacrificing his gifts for melody and grand, sweeping arrangements.”
From Wikipedia: “Among the large cast of backing musicians were Eric Clapton and Delaney & Bonnie’s Friends band – three of whom formed Derek and the Dominos with Clapton during the recording – as well as Ringo Starr, Gary Wright, [Billy] Preston, Klaus Voormann, John Barham, Badfinger, and Pete Drake.”
The hit song from the George Harrison triple album All Things Must Pass is “My Sweet Lord”; it was the first #1 hit by an ex-Beatle and was also the biggest selling single in the UK in 1971. The song was addressed to the Hindu God Krishna, though American audiences at least could be forgiven for feeling that Harrison was singing to Jesus. The thrust of the song was calling for an end to sectarianism through the mixing of background chants of “Hare Krishna” with “Hallelujah”. While George Harrison said that the melody was adapted from a Christian hymn “Oh Happy Day” (whose copyright had expired), a court case brought by the writer of a song by the Chiffons called “He’s So Fine” found otherwise. I have written in more detail of this court case previously.
The title song of All Things Must Pass, “All Things Must Pass” is considered to be one of George Harrison’s finest compositions. As told in Wikipedia: “Music critic Ian MacDonald described ‘All Things Must Pass’ as ‘the wisest song never recorded by the Beatles’, while author [and Harrison biographer] Simon Leng considers it ‘perhaps the greatest solo Beatle composition’. The subject matter deals with the transient nature of human existence, and in Harrison’s ‘All Things Must Pass’ reading, lyrics and music combine to reflect impressions of optimism against fatalism. On release, together with Barry Feinstein’s album cover image, commentators viewed the song as a statement on the Beatles’ break-up.”
The George Harrison song was originally recorded by Billy Preston – under the name “All Things (Must) Pass” – on his 1970 Apple Records release Encouraging Words. The lyrics were inspired by a 1968 poem by a different sort of guru, Timothy Leary called “All Things Pass”, a psychedelic adaptation of a classical Chinese text called the Tao Te Ching.
While this song was never released as a single, George Harrison had another hit from this album called “What Is Life”.
Ringo Starr is without a doubt the most under-appreciated member of the Beatles, so it is not surprising that, when us four Winfree kids divvied up the Fab Four among ourselves, I wound up with Ringo as my favorite Beatle.
Ringo Starr (real name: Richard Starkey, Jr.) was the final addition to the classic line-up when he was brought in as the band’s drummer, replacing Pete Best. He is the oldest of the Beatles (all of 23 when they hit the big time), having been born three months before John Lennon.
As a young teenager, he contracted tuberculosis in 1953 and was in a sanatorium for two years. To encourage physical activity, a makeshift drum set was set up next to his bed, and he later joined the band at the hospital. Ringo Starr recalls: “I was in the hospital band. . . . That’s where I really started playing. I never wanted anything else from there on. . . . My grandparents gave me a mandolin and a banjo, but I didn’t want them. My grandfather gave me a harmonica. . . . we had a piano – nothing. Only the drums.”
While working as a machinist in a local factory, Richard Starkey befriended Roy Trafford, who introduced him to skiffle music. The two began practicing together and were joined by another co-worker Eddie Miles, forming the Eddie Miles Band that was later renamed Eddie Clayton and the Clayton Squares. (Interestingly, Eric Clapton took the pseudonym “Eddie Clayton” in his credits for Wonderwall Music, perhaps from this connection).
As skiffle became displaced by American rock and roll, and billed as Ritchie Starkey, he joined a band called Texans in November 1959 that was led by Al Caldwell. They were a well known skiffle band that was trying to reinvent themselves as a rock band. The band went through several names – the Raging Texans, then Jet Storm and the Raging Texans – before settling on Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. Starkey developed the Ringo Starr persona at that time, due to his propensity for wearing numerous rings. They became one of the top bands in Liverpool in 1960 and eventually made their way to Hamburg, where they crossed paths with the Beatles; initially, however, they were billed above the Fab Four and were also paid more.
Ringo Starr arguably has had the most successful post-Beatles career. His first solo album, Sentimental Journey is a collection of pre-rock standards; made mainly to please his parents, he is one of the first rock musicians to attempt to cover these earlier styles of music. After a country collection called Beaucoups of Blues, Ringo Starr settled back into rock music and made a series of excellent albums that spawned nearly as many major hit songs as his three better-known bandmates combined: two #1 singles, “Photograph” and “You’re Sixteen” plus “It Don’t Come Easy”, “Back Off Boogaloo”, “Oh My My”, “Only You”, and “No No Song”.
For the past 25 years, Ringo Starr has spent most of his time with Ringo Starr’s All Starr Band, which has featured a rotating line-up of some of the finest rock musicians on earth, Levon Helm, Joe Walsh, Nils Lofgren, Billy Squier, and Edgar Winter among them. They are dropping by the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the middle of next month.
In an interview published in 2010 in The Daily Telegraph that was mostly about the “more popular than Jesus” business, Ringo Starr says that he has found religion: “For me, God is in my life. I don’t hide from that. I think the search has been on since the 1960’s.”
The Under Appreciated Rock Artist for this month is NICK FREUND, a Catholic priest who joined the faculty at the St. Pius X Seminary, in Galt, California (near Sacramento) where he taught for 8 years as an English teacher and headed the band and choir. He had been a musical composer before, having created a Gregorian chant in 1963 for a Catholic mass. The following year, the Roman Catholic Church abandoned the use of Gregorian chants in services. He then worked on choral music and an amazing acid-folk Christian album by a group called the Search Party. Freund even gave Duke Ellington some advice on how to use local choirs when he came through town on concerts. The double CD that I have has the intriguing title, The News Is You: The Sacred & Secular Music of Nick Freund, on Lion Productions Records.
Much as happened with the priest who oversaw the creation of last month’s UARB, the Holy Ghost Reception Committee #9, his students were resistant to the classical composers like Mozart and Beethoven and told him: “Father, you ought to check out a place in San Francisco called The Fillmore.”
What Rev. Nicholas T. Freund found there was a revelation, and did he show up on a good night that first time: The performers were Cream, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Big Brother and the Holding Company. He recounts in the CD’s liner notes: “Eric Clapton’s guitar playing amazed me. . . . Janis Joplin . . . blew me away. The next day, the kids said: ‘Get your records out! Nick’s been to the Fillmore!’ I became interested in adapting the San Francisco sound to church music.”
As Nick Freund puts it: “I enjoy Bach and Gregorian chant. But I don’t see it as an expression of today. It’s like a beautiful old painting in a museum – you admire and appreciate it, but it has no relevance to ‘Now’. We should express our worship of God in terms we use today.” Also: “I could spend years writing a classical concert, and nobody would ever hear it.”
Nick Freund began working with four of his students to form a band that took the name the Search Party: Peter Apps (lead guitar and vocals), Joanie Goff (vocals and guitar), Jim Carvalho (bass, guitar and vocals), and Tim King (drums). Freund himself was evidently on organ and composed most of the music; he also produced the album. The music was recorded in 1968 at the Montgomery Chapel at San Francisco Theological Seminary, so Montgomery Chapel became the name of the album. Just 600 copies were pressed on the tiny Century Records label, and the band performed together live only once, at a sort of “thank you” party. Nick Freund left California and joined the faculty at Mount Saint Paul College in Waukesha, Wisconsin later that year.
Perhaps owing to the desire to meld religious sentiments with psychedelic music, most of the songs are at a meditative pace, but there are some guitar fireworks on display from time to time. The vocals are simply lovely, with strong lead vocals that are often punctuated by eerie choral sections.
The songs where Joanie Goff has the lead are particularly notable, such as the opening track “Speak to Me”: “I feel you in the mountains, I feel you in the sea / I feel you all around me Lord / Oh Lord, speak to me!”
Goff sings harmony vocals on “When He Calls”: “When He calls, He’ll ask you to die; burn your boats and walk at His side / When He calls, He seldom tells why; it’s up to you to face and decide.”
The religious messages in the remaining songs by the Search Party are more subtle. Nick Freund recalls: “I wrote [“You and I”] after returning from counseling a divorced woman. I tried to incorporate into the song the tenseness I felt when talking to her. It’s an expression of today’s station-wagon housewife, tense and keyed up, frustrated with life.” Joanie Goff expresses these feelings wonderfully in her lead vocals on this song.
The only long song on the Search Party album, “So Many Things Have Got Me Down” has stuttering musical passages and shares sentiments common in 1960’s young people: “I don’t know why I’m hanging around, so many things have got me down / I alone, all alone, no one to talk with, nobody needs me / I want someone to share the nothing that I offer . . . Some have said that God is dead; others complain about what is said . . . My friends say religion is a private club for those who can’t face the contradictions of life.”
On the final song on the album, “The News Is You”, the band finally rocks out.
Nick Freund again: “It took me five years to learn songs shouldn’t answer questions, but should pose them. I used to write songs with answers, but they were trite – really ech! . . . People go through life from day to day, getting up, going to work, coming home, eating, going to bed, and maybe a fishing trip or vacation thrown in once in a while. There’s more to life, and it is the artist’s job to make people see it.”
About the Search Party album that he worked on, Freund said: “Some people react to the record by saying it’s depressing. It’s not depressing – it’s deep. It quiets you down and makes you think.”
The remainder of the first CD has several popular-music renditions of selected sections of the Catholic Mass; they include the rock- and folk-flavored “Prayer for Mercy”, “Kyrie and Gloria”, “Lord, Have Mercy”, and “Love One Another”, plus “Bossa Nova Mass” and “Kyrie from ‘Jazz Mass’”. A fairly well known hymn is included, “They’ll Know We are Christians by Our Love”. This song was written in 1968 by Peter Scholtes (also a Catholic priest), who also wrote “Bossa Nova Mass”; Jars of Clay has recorded the song, among others. The final cut, “Walking out Song” was evidently written by yet another Catholic priest, John Barry.
These songs are not unlike what could be heard at churches across the country for the past several decades, though not this lovely and rich – the same meditative pace on much of the Search Party album is also present here. It is hard to imagine now how contentious was the melding of popular music and church; Nick Freund remembers the resistance to what he was trying to do: “The younger priests think it’s great, but the older ones feel I’m betraying the great tradition of Christian music, or ‘bringing the nightclub into the church’. I’m not ‘betraying’ anything. I’m building on tradition – I simply dig the modern stuff.”
The music on the second disk also came out on Century Records; it is performed by the St. Pius X Seminary Choir and is called Each One Heard in His Own Language. This music was written and arranged in the year or two before the Search Party album came together, and the work was performed live in the Spring of 1968. This disc also includes the first music recorded by Peter Apps of the Search Party, who sings some passages and also plays lead guitar.
I can probably count the number of choral albums in my collection on one hand, though they include some of my all-time favorites. The album Little Drummer Boy by the Harry Simeone Chorale is one; this is where most people heard one of my favorite Christmas songs, “Little Drummer Boy” for the first time, though the song (originally called “Carol of the Drum” and written in 1941 by Katherine Kennicott Davis) had previously been recorded by the Trapp Family Singers. Then there is Christmas Hymns and Carols by the Robert Shaw Chorale, the Christmas album passed down from my parents that we always played while we decorated the Christmas tree. I finally got a second copy of the album for them – a reissue on Pickwick Records called Joy to the World – when I couldn’t bear the numerous skips any longer, though Mom and Dad still usually got out the old one.
But Each One Heard in His Own Language is no standard choral album; there is a psychedelic element and some searing musicianship in this performance as well, particularly in the first song, “Pentecost Sunday, Double Alleluia”. “Who Is This Man” features some jarring, discordant harmonica. Mostly a folk-rock band is playing while the choir sings.
The title of this disk is taken from the miraculous “speaking in tongues” passage in the Bible; in fact, “Side 1” of the original album is subtitled Acts 2:1-12 where the story is recounted. The performance begins with the Biblical passage, in both solo and choral readings, with the addition of modern peoples to the list of “Parthians, Medes and Elamites” and others that is given in the Bible: “Each one heard in his own language about the marvels of God”.
The final song on “Side 1” of Each One Heard in His Own Language is a rocking rendition of the well-known “Get Together”, though this was before the Youngbloods made a hit of the song in 1969. The song dates from the early 1960’s and had been recorded by We Five (it was the follow-up to the 1965 hit song “You Were on My Mind” by this band, who as I recall style themselves as the first band in San Francisco to go electric). Other versions were made by Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys, Jefferson Airplane, Hamilton Camp, Carpenters, the Dave Clark Five, H. P. Lovecraft, and many others.
“Side 2” is subtitled Mass for the Secular City and is, I suppose, a proper Mass set to popular rhythms, or at least the song listing seems to indicate that: “Introit: Sing to the Lord”, “Kyrie: Lament of the City”, “Gloria: Joy in the City”, etc. The repetition of “they can’t kill me, for I have already died” in “Credo: Death in the City” is particularly moving.
The performance also tells the story of a musician named Johnny Lamb who comes to the city in search of fulfillment. The choir is accompanied by a full band, and the same powerful organ on the Search Party’s Montgomery Chapel is in evidence on this music. There are a few bonus tracks at the end of this CD that include Bach’s “Prelude and Fugue in G Minor” – over which the history of St. Pius X Seminary is told – and “Hail Mary”.
The Search Party had its origins in the Rejects, a garage rock band that originally included Peter Apps and Jim Carvalho among its members. Formed in about 1963, the Rejects also included Mike Casey on lead guitar and Mark Helmar on rhythm guitar; Apps was the drummer. Their repertoire included “Little Black Egg” that had been recorded by the Golliwogs (who later became Creedence Clearwater Revival) and “Mr. Tambourine Man”, the Bob Dylan song that was a hit for the Byrds.
After Joanie Goff joined the Rejects, they changed their name to Mother Cabrini Jug Band and Punt Return Team (ah, youth!) and had some local gigs and a performance at the Agnew State Hospital.
While not giving the album a glowing review, Richie Unterberger says in Allmusic of the Search Party’s Montgomery Chapel album (the original release, that is): “There were many psychedelic albums like this issued in small press runs in the late ’60s: folky, bittersweet melodies that tilted toward the downright sad and melancholy; high strident female vocals sharing duties with less memorable, more normal-sounding male singing; a studied over-seriousness to the vocal delivery; a naïve, questing-for-the-meaning-of-life tone to the compositions; and organ residing in a halfway house between the LSD trip and the mortuary. Even if you take it as a given that most of these albums have a dated pretentiousness that many would poke fun at, however, this is certainly one of the better such efforts in this mini-genre, and possessed of some real musical appeal in spite of its considerable flaws. Most of the arrangements have an understated, effective (if somewhat creepy) eeriness. Songs like ‘Speak to Me’, ‘Renee Child’, ‘Poem By George Hall’, and ‘The Decidedly Short Epic of Mr. Alvira’ are good time-capsule mood pieces in their evocative otherworldliness, at times sounding a little like a psychedelic seance.”
FLASHBACK: The Under-Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for September 2012 – CODE BLUE
Including one of the founding members of the new wave band the Motels, Code Blue released a couple of albums that had only limited success; that doesn’t stop their music from being terrific, however. From YouTube, here is one of their best songs, “Face to Face”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUWxDrhTu3Q . A total of nine songs by the band is available here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsVx5tvLCg8&index=6&list=PLmycY91Rv1ymUrfYUujetZUzifwZVVxE7 .
PICTURE GALLERY: The Under-Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for September 2011 – ULTRA
This is a copy of the CD that I have:
This is another CD with their music on a different label:
This is a photo of the band, I think when they were a little older:
And another, with them in concert:
STORY OF THE MONTH: The Piltdown Man and Brontosaurus (from October 2010)
The Piltdown Men fast became one of my favorite band names, and how could it not? “The Piltdown Man” is one of the most famous and most successful paleontological hoaxes in history. From its “discovery” in 1912 in an English gravel pit, the skull fragments were accepted as genuine – though not unanimously in the scientific community – until ultimately proven conclusively in 1953 (more than 40 years later, and just 7 years before the Piltdown Men were formed) as being a fraudulent amalgamation of a modern human skull and the jaw of an orangutan with chimpanzee teeth hammered into it.
Interestingly enough, the iconic dinosaur Brontosaurus referenced in their biggest American hit “Brontosaurus Stomp” is also a mixed-up fossil, though in this case, it was unintentional. The largest dinosaur skeleton found up to that point in time (1879) became the first mounted sauropod (in 1905 at the Peabody Museum at Yale University) and was described as being Brontosaurus. Despite being nearly complete, the skeleton was missing the skull, so one was provided from another dinosaur called Camarasaurus (the actual head turned out to be more like that of Brontosaurus’ cousin, Diplodocus). However, subsequent scientific investigation very early in the 20th Century revealed that this skeleton (sans the wrong head) was actually an adult example of the Apatosaurus, which had been discovered and described two years earlier using a juvenile example; “Brontosaurus” was then demoted to a synonym. Still, every dinosaur book I looked through as a kid had the “thunder lizard” pictured and described along with Stegosaurus, Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops, and all the rest.
